Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus that cancels a job upon occurrence of an error, and a control method therefor.
Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, in an office environment, a plurality of users submits print jobs to an image forming apparatus using printer drivers or the like from their respective host computers and causes the image forming apparatus to perform printing. To cope with a case where an image forming apparatus stops due to occurrence of an error such as a paper jam, there is a method in which a user manually fixes the error to resume a print job without turning off the power to the image forming apparatus. Another method in which an image forming apparatus automatically cancels a print job when an error occurs is disclosed in Japanese Patent No. 4,584,731.
The above conventional techniques, however, have problems because when a job is cancelled immediately upon occurrence of an error, the efficiency of a printing process decreases to bring about an increase in user workload. On the other hand, in an environment where a plurality of print jobs has been submitted when a printing process for a suspended job is resumed, if another person manually fixes an error, a job may be resumed upon a lapse of a long time to output printed matter. This presents a security problem that, against the intent of a person who submitted a job, a third party may see printed matter that is highly confidential.
To solve the problems of the conventional techniques described above, there has been proposed a technique to allow a user to arbitrarily set a time period that elapses before a job is cancelled after an error occurs, and automatically cancel a print job upon a lapse of the set time period.
Also, lately, some image forming apparatuses are equipped with a connecting interface to connect with a fax line and have a fax receiving function of printing received fax data. Further, some image forming apparatuses have what is called a fax memory receiving mode in which received data is not immediately printed upon receipt, but is temporarily stored on an HDD or a nonvolatile memory, and printing is performed after an instruction to perform printing is received from a user. When the fax memory receiving mode is enabled, printing is allowed to be performed later even if a print job is cancelled. However, when an image forming apparatus does not have the fax memory receiving mode or when the fax memory receiving mode is disabled, data received by fax is not stored when a print job is cancelled, and hence printing cannot be performed after that.
Therefore, cancellation across the board may not be appropriate for some types of jobs. Specifically, like some jobs such as a facsimile job, a problem may occur irrespective of whether or not it is automatically cancelled. On the other hand, some jobs such as a job submitted from a host computer are dealt with by re-submission or the like in ordinary cases even after they are cancelled because a user notices the cancellation within a short period of time.